If the choices are present immediate need vs. five year guess work, I vote for five-year guesswork.
My personal preference at this point would be maximum foreseeable need within reason, but that’s really hard to codify and even harder to implement in a fair or unbiased manner. Until someone proposes a better alternative than 5 year projections, I say let’s stick with that. Whatever you can afford is NOT a better answer IMHO. Owen > On Jun 25, 2026, at 15:21, John W. O'Brien <[email protected]> wrote: > > Network engineering is hard to do well. Predicting the future is much harder > to do. > > IPv4 addresses are a scarce, valuable resource, which makes them susceptible > to fraud, abuse, and negligence in a way that is significant for honest, > competent participants. Requiring documented forecasts under contract terms > acts as a check on these things because it helps with detection and avoidance > as well as when it becomes necessary to litigate. However, this also imposes > costs on ARIN and on every participating operator. > > IPv6 addresses are not scarce, and not expected to become scarce within a > very, very long horizon. While IPv6 address space is not immune to bad > actors, it is intrinsically much more resilient than IPv4, which is kind of > the whole point. We should take advantage of this strength to lower the bar. > > I favor eliminating n-year planning horizons for IPv6 in all but outlier > cases. > > What constitutes an outlier? It might have to do with the total number of > allocations (e.g. > 2) or maybe the rate (e.g. < 6 mo since last allocation). > > >> On 2026-06-25 16:59, William Herrin wrote: >> Howdy, >> I didn't see any feedback on the draft policy rewriting section 6.5, >> so I want to step back and solicit your opinions on what ARIN's IPv6 >> policies should become. I'm going to ask some questions and break them >> into separate message threads so that they can be followed separately >> according to your interest. >> The question for this thread is: Should the policy take n-year >> projections into account or should it be something like current >> demonstrated need and ARIN automatically adds a large pad? >> Three and five year IP address use projections, and requirements to >> use addresses within a period of time are a tradition held over from >> IPv4 policy. With IPv4 ARIN tries to balance consumption of two scarce >> resources: IPv4 address blocks and Internet BGP routing table slots. >> Every IP address one registrant is granted is an IP address another >> registrant can't have. But, every discontiguous address block >> allocated to the same organization is another slot in the BGP table >> they will consume, whether or not their network engineering requires >> it. >> So, ARIN tries to allocate enough addresses at a time to meet the >> organization's reasonably foreseeable need. They were going to come >> back for more anyway, and this way they don't needlessly consume BGP >> slots. >> These sort of multi-year planning horizons used to justify ARIN >> address grants are present in the IPv6 policies as well, both in the >> current section 6.5 and in draft 2026-2. >> Are they needed? Are they wanted? >> If we don't go too crazy, we have enough IPv6 addresses for everybody, >> far into the foreseeable future. If anything, the annual ARIN fee is >> enough to suppress careless consumption. We still have limited space >> in the BGP table. In principle, ARIN doesn't ever want registrants >> coming back for more IPv6 addresses. To the maximum extent practical, >> they want that first allocation to be the only one so that network >> engineering alone drives how much of the BGP table the registrant >> consumes. >> What are your thoughts? Continue to use n-year planning horizons? >> Replace that with language around avoidance of a second allocation? A >> third option? Your views are respectfully requested. >> Regards, >> Bill Herrin >> _______________________________________________ >> ARIN-PPML >> You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to >> the ARIN Public Policy Mailing List ([email protected]). >> Unsubscribe or manage your mailing list subscription at: >> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://lists.arin.net/mailman/listinfo/arin-ppml__;!!IBzWLUs!VoSs47J9K7B3Y1k6ZkU4Hq7NCRgiI45VIrFuE8_HXYncmY6n_NgL-vPF1bo0y2UO6AtZk_nIvnjZItY$ >> Please contact [email protected] if you experience any issues. > > _______________________________________________ > ARIN-PPML > You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to > the ARIN Public Policy Mailing List ([email protected]). > Unsubscribe or manage your mailing list subscription at: > https://lists.arin.net/mailman/listinfo/arin-ppml > Please contact [email protected] if you experience any issues. > <OpenPGP_signature.asc> _______________________________________________ ARIN-PPML You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the ARIN Public Policy Mailing List ([email protected]). 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